


The Winner Writes the Rulebook

by Iambic



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Other, character death mention, gender nonspecific hawke, postgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 00:49:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1569869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surviving, unfortunately, means living with what you've done, and who you've left behind. And, in your case, not getting your mail on time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Winner Writes the Rulebook

  
Turnabout finds you on the Free Marches coastline, somewhere to the north and west of Kirkwall, dreaming longingly of Fereldan winters as the late spring heat melts the vitality from your muscles, through your pores. Your father taught you spells for chill and high wind, but it was Bethany who always had the clever tricks for turning them to mundane use as well. Sure, the great Champion of Kirkwall could defeat a high dragon with a few arcane gestures (or at least, that's how Varric told it), but you never did get the hang of the invisible fan.  
  
You're waiting for the fog to come in. Three days of heavy heat and you know it's sitting out on the ocean, waiting for a wind to roll it ashore. Raider weather, Isabela had called it, chuckling and patting the nearest ballista on the ship you'd helped her acquire. Armed to the teeth with projectiles and Merrill, who seemed bound and determined to learn the sea despite a natural disagreement with it. (She'd never quite got her sea legs, but she managed to lose the sickness long before you pulled your sorry ass abovedeck.) They could be out there now, bound for Llomerryn, with a hold of goods only some of which were ill-gotten. Isabela would be grumbling about the cold -- couldn't be bothered to wear additional clothes for it, not if she could feel some of her extremities still.  
  
Or maybe there's a ship full of refugees from another toppled Circle, fingers locked around their staves and low voices not quite united in prayer. You boarded such a vessel early in your flight, before they started knowing your face. But you couldn't take the questions. Which Circle, and then when you said none, what's it like, as an apostate. Do you kill to keep your secret. Have you been to Kirkwall, did you meet the hero. You had to leave because you weren't sure who they meant.  
  
A drop of sweat trickles down the back of your neck. Should've taken a knife to your hair weeks ago, but it falls around your face in a kind of hood and vanity has a harder fight against practicality than certain Guard Captains might have thought. There's still hours left to the afternoon and lying on your rented cot is not helping them to pass any quicker, or cooler.  
  
The ship you're waiting for is a quick little thing, just big enough to cross the Waking Sea instead of skirting it, with the lightest cargo in all Thedas. It'll dock in a cove used by smugglers with whom you've developed an accord, and sometimes it goes back a little heftier than it came. It's late, but that's nothing new, in these uncertain waters.  
  
It'll be cooler down in the cove, on the water. You consider your boots -- you really ought to have invested in sandals before you became too infamous for most city marketplaces -- but leave them haphazardly against the wall, and tread barefoot through the quiet inn and out to the town.  
  
Gulls Bluff isn't much of a town. It boasts one main street, untouched by cobblestones, a handful of weathered buildings, and a dock, where the fishers sell their catch as they haul it in. The baker brings bread round in the mornings, and her wife runs the mill that stands uphill of the whole affair on the bluff, creaking amiably in the sea breeze. There's a smithy on the other side of town, but it's silent today. It's probably because of the heat.  
  
They know you here, but not by reputation. They ask your name but only as a gesture of friendliness, and they appreciate your coin, little of it there is now. The herbalist, wheeling her gathering cart back into town, waves at you as you pass, but doesn't bother to stop and chat. That's sort of how they are here. That's why this is where you stopped.  
  
You take the path around the lee side of the bluff, which slopes kindly down to the low-tide beach, and clamber up onto the small jetty. Overhead the seagulls cry, and the waves crash out of time against the rocks, and you breathe in the sharp clean scent of the open ocean and don't think of Kirkwall at all.  
  
\--  
  
Late spring in Kirkwall smelled of garbage. Rotting food, piss, and foundry soot mingled in the air and got into everything; eventually you just stopped noticing it. Usually. If only because the Maker blessed you with yearly hay fever. "Picked up some Antivan perfume?" you asked Varric, meeting him in Lowtown one unfortunate evening when your sinuses had cleared.  
  
"You noticed. I'm flattered," he replied, cheerfully as ever -- Varric, bred to Kirkwall garbage just as you were bred to dogs and mud. "But really, Hawke, do you actually think I'd need imported perfume to attract women? One whiff of my dwarven musk and they swoon where they stand."  
  
The usual riff. You'd respond with something about body odor, he'd say at least it was his own aroma and not a dog as well, you'd link arms and waltz into the Hanged Man like you owned the place. Wouldn't have called it the good old days; wouldn't have known to. That night there might have been something of the future echoing in the back of your head, because that night you paused the banter there in the middle where a naked truth had been hiding.  
  
"Oh, I don't think it's just the women."  
  
\--  
  
If you can bring yourself to wake up early, you can catch the fog before it pulls back out to sea. You never quite make the sunrise, but this morning, barefoot again, you jog through the tingling chill to the town dock. Only one boat of two is back, father and daughter unloading crab traps from its belly. They let you help stack them on the dock. The deal is this: you help Elena with the heavy lifting, take the burden off Manu's rheumatic hips, and then they boil you a crab right there on the dock and that's breakfast. There's something comforting about hard physical labor, the feeling of an honest sweat and then stepping back and saying, I did this. Back when you struck it rich in the deep roads you'd sworn never to work hard like that again, but there were worse things than hard work yet to come then. You think you can understand your father a little better now.  
  
Elena's just like Carver, too, headstrong and determined to remind you that you're not necessary, even if you are useful to have around, but you can tell she approves of you because when you make Manu laugh her eyes crinkle up at the sides. She and Manu have darker complexion than your family, though not by a lot; Elena's hair comes in shoulder length waves instead of irregularly cropped crinkles like Carver and you. (Bethany's hair had only barely curved in, smooth and shining, but she had always looked most like Mother.) Manu likes to wink at the two of you but you're too old for her, and she calls to mind too many ghosts.  
  
You like the work, and the company, and the simplicity of that. You like to make new associations, laughing at the crabs waving their gauntleted hands in their little boxes, breaking the shells open and spilling salt water all down your shirt.  
  
\--  
  
When you came into money for the first time in your life, Isabela and Varric both insisted they introduce you to gourmet cuisine, which Varric informed you was Orlesian for 'the good stuff.' Fish eggs didn't really do it for you, but you liked the imported fruits well enough. Finer cuts of meat didn't really make much difference in a stew, but once your mother and Bodhan had kindly forbid you from the kitchen, you did notice a pleasant change in tenderness. At the parties you were encouraged to attend, or attended out of spite where you weren't precisely wanted, you tried dishes you couldn't pronounce and certainly couldn't eat with proper decor. You went on a kick for a while, eating at celebrated chefs' kitchens and bringing home any fancy spice your mother even dimly recognised. But there was rarely fish.  
  
"It's so common here," Varric explained, after a surprised laugh. "No exclusivity. Of course we could probably order some langosteens if you want to get really fancy, but those travel a long way north."  
  
You went to a fishmonger's instead. Actually, you went twice, the second time with Isabela in tow, to help your inexperienced nose determine the freshness of the catch. She offered to fry it up for you, so the late afternoon found the two of you in front of the stove, dodging boiling oil spit from the pan and trying, often unsuccessfully, to flip the fish. It was a bit charred at the end, but you ate it right there in the smoky kitchen. With your fingers. Nice thing about dining with Isabela was, no one gave a shit about manners.  
  
"I can cook now," you told Varric the next day, when you'd scrubbed the clinging smoke away. He raised both eyebrows. "Trust me, I remember how bad I was before. I tried something simpler. Isabela showed me how."  
  
"That's not exactly encouraging," he replied, but he accompanied you home anyway. It took him about five minutes of watching you go through the motions to slide in and take the pan from you.  
  
"Does this have a cover? You don't know. And you're not even cooking it with anything? At least toss in some thyme, Hawke, we're not barbarians."  
  
He took the fish off the heat, rummaged through a few shelves and pulled out a collection of the fancy condiments you'd bought without knowing what for. They went into the pan as well. Then it went back on the flame, already smelling better than your efforts yesterday. He didn't burn anything, either, sliding the fish out onto a plate in only a few minutes.  
  
"Nothing fancy," he said, "but at least it's cooked right. I hope you were watching."  
  
"Don't think I caught it all," you told him, not quite as mock-earnestly as you meant. "You might have to come back tomorrow."  
  
He laughed again at that. It was worth the damage to your pride, making Varric laugh, even if it happened all the time without your help. Maybe especially because of that. "Congratulations, Hawke," he said, composing himself, "You really are the least subtle person I know."  
  
But he came back the next night, and the night following.  
  
\--  
  
The problem with avoiding thinking about something is that there's no use reminding yourself to do it. Can't write it down. Can't tie a knot around your finger. Could maybe write it in blood and coerce a demon into taking it from you, but you're a little bit selfish and a little bit inclined to hold onto the pain. Also, you're not a blood mage. (Not anymore.)  
  
You try not to wallow. It's bad for your complexion, after all. But when you've spent a good seven years building yourself a new family on the remains of the old.... well, you feel it when that house comes down. All that work to start anew, and it leaves you on the run and even more alone than before.  
  
The road wasn't bad at first. You liked the traveling, even if you'd begun to weary of adventure. You're not that old yet, but you keep getting older. There's a couple greys in your hair these days. You've said goodbye to enough friends and family, and buried the rest. Sometimes you wish they could've all gone in the same graveyard.  
  
Aveline said something once, about Wesley, how she'd never let go of that moment his life sputtered and died on her blade. The cruelest cut. You'd never understood, not really, until Anders' blood was on your knife and no matter how he'd seemed to ask for it. Well. You can't take back a strike like that.  
  
You, and all your living friends, you've all made that cruel cut. And maybe that's why you can't live with each other any more.  
  
You're wallowing now, of course, and you try not to, but the horizon is clear of fog today and there's not a boat in sight. Your hair is clinging damply to the back of your neck, but there's no weight on you but the guilt you drag around with you and the blighted heat.  
  
\--  
  
"But seriously, though," Varric said, comfortable against your side as the room gently tipped and swayed, "do you think you'll ever get tired of Kirkwall?"  
  
You wanted to kiss him. Again. But he wasn't going anywhere right now, you could hold off. You were strong like that.  
  
"Nah," you replied, "but Kirkwall will probably get tired of me."


End file.
